There are often special safety considerations associated with travel, including those associated with a traveler becoming lost, either accidentally or as a result of criminal activity like kidnapping. For the security and peace of mind of the traveler, as well as a related organization (such as a family of the traveler, or business or government agency employing the traveler), it can be desirable to track the traveler's position during travel.
While technology to do this is readily available (e.g., by automatically receiving position reports from a mobile device carried by the traveler) it suffers from various shortcomings. For instance, where an organization may have a large number of travelers abroad at any given time, coordination and organization of the information may be insufficient to allow it to be usefully processed in a timely manner by the organization. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is often a conflict between a desire for privacy on the part of individual travelers, and a desire for information on the part the related organization. A traveler might therefore disable or leave behind his or her mobile device in the interests of privacy, despite the greater associated risk. Accordingly, there is a need for systems and methods to satisfactorily verify the location of traveling users without the need for automatic tracking of the users.